El Salvador rolled out a new national payments app called Sivar on Sept. 29, built to move remittance money into the country using stablecoins rather than Bitcoin. The app, developed by Modveon on Coinbase infrastructure, settles transfers in digital dollars on the Base network. It's a quiet split from the country's better-known Bitcoin experiment — and it comes as roughly $9 billion in remittances flowed into El Salvador in 2025.
A flat $2 fee, no blockchain homework required
Sivar works like this: senders in the US fund transfers with debit cards, and recipients back home get value through wallets embedded in the app. The fee is $2 per transfer, regardless of size. That's the pitch — no percentage skim, no exchange-rate spread buried in the fine print.
Users don't manage private keys or think about gas. Each account gets a non-custodial wallet, while Coinbase handles the onramp, transfer APIs and settlement. Recipients can cash out at more than 1,000 locations across the country. Coinbase says more than 25,000 Salvadorans signed up before launch.
Coinbase Chief Policy Officer Faryar Shirzad said the economics work because transfers move entirely in digital dollars. That's the whole trick: abstract the crypto rails away, and the product stops being a crypto product to the people using it.
Why stablecoins and not Bitcoin
El Salvador made Bitcoin legal tender in 2021, partly on the promise that it would make cross-border payments cheaper. Five years later, the government's own Bitcoin Office marked the anniversary this month by pointing to its Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, Bitcoin education in public schools, training for 80,000 civil servants, designated Bitcoin Zones and the CUBO+ developer program. Government data cited by the office puts national holdings at about 7,789 BTC.
The remittance product, though, is running on dollar-denominated stablecoins. For families receiving money from the US — roughly 92% of El Salvador's remittances originate there, according to Coinbase — a balance that doesn't swing in price is the practical choice. An estimated 1.6 million Salvadorans depend on those payments.
This isn't the first stablecoin play in the market. MoneyGram expanded its USDC-based balance into El Salvador in April through a partnership with the Stellar Development Foundation, Crossmint and Circle, letting customers hold a dollar digital balance before withdrawing cash at MoneyGram locations. El Salvador was the first new Latin American market after the product's initial launch in Colombia. MoneyGram says its broader network spans almost 500,000 retail locations across more than 200 countries and territories.
Tether also relocated its headquarters to El Salvador in 2025 after securing authorization as both a stablecoin issuer and a digital-asset service provider, and integrated USDT with Bitcoin's Lightning Network to pair dollar payments with Bitcoin settlement.
The IMF is watching the Bitcoin ledger
El Salvador's Bitcoin accumulation has been a running point of friction with the International Monetary Fund. This month the IMF said the country has used no public resources to buy Bitcoin since its first program review. The government provided documentation showing later increases came from private donations. The IMF said it expects no further Bitcoin accumulation beyond those documented donations.
That's a notable line for a country that once staked its payments reputation on Bitcoin. The reserve keeps growing, but on donors' dimes, not taxpayers'.
What to watch
Sivar's real test is whether the $2 flat fee holds up at scale and whether the 1,000-plus cash-out points are enough to reach the rural departments where remittance dependence runs deepest. Coinbase hasn't said how many of the 25,000 pre-launch signups are active senders versus recipients, and there's no public timeline for expanding beyond the US–El Salvador corridor. For now, the app is live, the wallets are non-custodial, and the settlement layer is Base.
